Our Perspective: Articles

Rapid User-Centered Design Techniques

Challenges and Solutions

Why it matters:

Organizations are challenged today to shorten and simplify processes but also want to get customer data into the development cycle. This is especially the case when development follows Agile development methods such as Extreme Programming (XP).

When development experiences a tight timeframe or teams react to heavy weight front-end design methods, in-depth work with users may be resisted.

Development teams often contend that developer intuition, expert user advisors, and lightweight usability testing is enough to collect user needs. But these techniques although quicker do not ensure a high quality product or application that work for the people who will use them.

The user-centered design community is challenged to develop techniques to infuse in-depth user data into a design and development process that can fit with short time frames, limited resources, and the 2-4 week iterations of XP.

At CHI 2005, a formal SIG provided a forum for participants to hear how different companies have tackled these problems. After initial presentations by a panel, over 80 people broke into eight topic groups to brainstorm issues they’re facing and possible solutions. The topics were: